The Song Weigher

The Song Weigher

Egill Skallagrímsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Eríkr Blooðax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill's poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve. Egill emerges from the poems a complex figure, full of internal contradictions. In his translations, Crockatt captures as much his propensity to sullenness as his flights of fantastical wordplay. The English translations are spare, maintaining the integrity and structure of the original and preserving also the kennings, which are an essential feature of Old Norse skaldic poetry. A kenning, in Crockatt's words, "tie[s] two objects together in a way that gives a vivid filmic quality to a third, the object they replace" (p.133). Thus "sea-thralled stallion" for "ship" (p.62); "sheath's ice-rays" for "swords" (p.66); and "praise-cairn" for "poem" (p.116). Each of these renderings captures the sense of the original evocatively and hints at the semantic density of these typically compact poems. Brian McMahon, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, 14 August 2018